[icon name=”calendar” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2015
[icon name=”clock-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] Time: 8:30 am – 9:30 am
Presented by Prof. Alan Lovegreen & Laura Westengard
Now popularly remembered as a California writer, John Steinbeck is equally a New York author. His 1925 introduction to NYC dramatically shaped the writer’s perceptions about urban life, manual labor, writer’s block, and even the weather. Our archival research unearths Steinbeck’s fascinating and virtually ignored first moments in Brooklyn, and then tracks the influence of such time on the fiction that defines his authorial career. Using his letters, local land use records, and archived periodicals, we reexamine this period of his life as a formative source of tragedy and trauma that Steinbeck later draws upon in his enduring literary works.